Tag Archives: IT systems

Earlier this year, the Pokémon Go smartphone game quickly captured worldwide attention. But the most compelling point about the game is that it blurred boundaries between the real and the virtual, as millions of people everywhere tried to track down virtual-world characters.

This is a sign of how the world is not just rapidly changing, but being reshaped. And the reshaping has a name: The Fourth Industrial Revolution. The first three industrial revolutions were founded, respectively, on mechanical power, electricity, and electronics and information technology.

The fourth is characterised by a merging of technologies that blurs the boundaries between the physical, digital and biological worlds. Billions of people are being connected by mobile devices, with unprecedented access to knowledge, processing power and storage.

In any major revolution, change is a universal constant. The sheer rate of change, or disruption, we are experiencing now is creating a world that is being reshaped faster than individuals and institutions can respond. This is why enterprises will have to be more focused than ever to keep up with developments in hardware and software, or very quickly fall behind.

Fujitsu is ready for this increased rate of change and we have a number of technologies in place to handle it. One such technology is a platform called Solidfire, which we believe is the definitive all-flash storage system for the next-generation data centre. Its massive scalability and inherent deep automation capabilities means this technology can predictably run thousands of mixed workload applications from a single shared system.

In the Fourth Industrial Revolution, change is driven by the Cloud, the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence. Businesses will operate according to four design principles:

Inter-operability: Machines, devices, sensors and people will communicate with each other via the Internet of Things, or the Internet of People, and by 2020, the number of internet-connected things will exceed 50 billion.

Information transparency: Information systems will use data from sensors to create virtual copies of selected parts of the physical world.

Technical assistance: Assistance systems will collect and visualise vast quantities of information for human decision-making and problem-solving, and cyber-physical systems will carry out tasks that we find unpleasant, exhausting, or unsafe.

Decentralised decision-making: Cyber-physical systems will make decisions and perform many tasks on their own (Fourth Industrial Revolution).

The traditional data centre wasn’t built for the Fourth Industrial Revolution so we will need a leap in orders of magnitude in IT and computing, like the SolidFire all-flash array, to give us the next-generation data centre and Fast IT. This solution:

can increase capacity and performance on demand, without downtime

delivers guaranteed performance to multiple different workloads

is programmable and automated

can continue even if something fails, without application re-configuration